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Common Lisp the Language, 2nd Edition
Throughout this chapter the notation S is used to
denote the jth element of the series S. As in a list or
vector, the first element of a series has the subscript zero.
The # macro character syntax #Zlist denotes a series that contains the elements of list. This syntax is also used when series are printed.
(choose-if #'symbolp #Z(a 2 b)) => #Z(a b)
Series are self-evaluating objects and the series data type is disjoint from all other types.
[Type specifier]
series element-type
The type specifier (series element-type) denotes the set of series whose elements are all members of the type element-type.
series arg &rest args
The function series returns an unbounded series that endlessly repeats the values of the arguments. The second example below shows the preferred method for constructing a bounded series.
(series 'b 'c) => #Z(b c b c b c ...) (scan (list 'a 'b 'c)) => #Z(a b c)


text: The Hohner Special 20 Classic A is a harmonica, in the A Tuning, with 20 Reeds. Big comfort and great tone, this harmonica comes with a durable plastic comb with mouthpiece for more playing comfort, and recessed reed plates affixed with screws. The stable construction and full sound make the Special 20 Classic one of the most popular Richter-models. Airtight, loud and reliable. Available in all major keys and in a special country or major 7th tuning!

subset: commoncrawl


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Duck Breasts with Citrus Port Cherry Sauce
SERVES: 4 servings
- 4 boneless duck breasts
- Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
- 1 large or 2 small shallots, minced
- 1/4 cup ruby port wine
- 1/3 cup freshly squeezed orange juice, plus 1 teaspoon orange zest
- 1/2 cup pitted frozen black cherries, thawed and roughly chopped
- Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.
- Score the skin of the duck breast with a knife in 2 directions, crossing over each other (makes a crosshatch). Season both sides of each duck breast with salt and pepper.
- In a large nonstick skillet, over medium-high heat, place the duck breasts skin side down. Sear the breasts until the skin is golden brown about 10 minutes, flip and sear the other side for just 3 minutes. Place the seared duck breasts in a baking dish skin side up, and put them in oven. Bake for 12 minutes. Remove the duck breasts from the oven and allow them to rest for 5 minutes.
- Meanwhile, pour off most excess fat from skillet, and place it back on the stovetop over medium heat. Add the shallots and saute until translucent. Pour in the port wine and orange juice, and scrape up any brown bits on the bottom of the pan. Add the orange zest and chopped cherries and bring to a boil. Simmer for about 5 minutes to reduce the mixture and thicken, mashing the cherries with the back of a wooden spoon to extract flavor as they cook.
- Slice the breasts into 1/4-inch slices on a diagonal. Pour the cherry port sauce over the top and enjoy!
- Cook's Note: excess duck fat can be refrigerated and is great for cooking potatoes or eggs.


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The good bad news is that the number is falling on its own. Down from 642 to 618. Big relief! Scan on Monday morn to double check errant embryo is not embedded where it shouldn't be, i.e. tube or anus. Off to have some wahn to celebrate!
Oh! Hahahaha! Just read the first comment and realized that you might think we had THAT kind of sex! No no, don't be silly! We are married for goodness sake! Married people don't even have sex, never mind do that kind of stuff!


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Saturday, February 27, 2010
"My name is Daarken and I am a concept artist and illustrator working for Mythic Entertainment. My friend Leif Jeffers, an animator at DreamWorks, and I are organizing an art auction fundraiser that will be held next year. Earlier this year my girlfriend, Cat, was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 25. On November 3rd, 2009, she had a bilateral mastectomy after going through 16 weeks of chemotherapy. As you can imagine it has been hard for her, not only mentally and physically, but financially. In order to help alleviate some of her medical bills Leif and I wanted to throw an art auction. The proceeds that are left over after her medical bills have been paid will go to a breast cancer related charity to be determined by the artists in the coming weeks."
Mike and Cat are newly engaged. Please give them your support, spread the word and do what you can for the charity.
Please visit the website for upcoming information on the showing and auction.
In the meantime you can donate on the main-page here.
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text: Community pharmacies with specially trained staff to provide HIV services can help HIV-infected individuals be more compliant with their essential antiviral drug regimens and hence improve patient outcomes. Users of HIV-specialized Walgreen pharmacies across the U.S. had significantly greater adherence to and persistence with their therapeutic drug regimens according to a study published in AIDS Patient Care and STDs, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the AIDS Patient Care and STDs website.* Patricia Murphy, MPH and coauthors from Walgreen Co. and University of California San Francisco School of Pharmacy compared therapeutic anti-HIV drug adherence (the degree to which patients follow their prescribed drug regimen) and persistence (the time to treatment discontinuation) for HIV/AIDS patients who used HIV-specialized pharmacies or traditional community pharmacies during the time span of a year. The study, "Impact of HIV Specialized Pharmacies on Adherence and Persistence with Antiretroviral Therapy," followed patients in nine cities across seven states. The researchers propose that their results should demonstrate the value of implementing policies to encourage the use of specialized HIV pharmacies for filling antiviral prescriptions. "While antiretroviral treatments have dramatically increased the health and life expectancy of people infected with HIV, and helped to slow HIV transmission, these medications only work if taken on a regular basis," says Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Laurence, MD, Director of the Laboratory for AIDS Virus Research at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, New York, NY. "Enlisting pharmacies in a multi-pronged approach to maintaining patient adherence is critical. This study demonstrates the role of the pharmacist in this important endeavor."


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The primary purposes of business websites are to attract customers and motivate them to take action. The action might be initiating contact, ordering something, bookmarking the site for future reference, or referring others to the business. If a site simply entertains without motivating, it's not doing its job. To build a site that will work for you, consider the following suggestions:
- Define your customers. Determine who is most likely to want your products or services, and why.
- List your customers' needs and concerns in order of importance. Then create headlines and text that relate your products or services to those needs, in the same order.
- Clearly describe the nature, characteristics, capabilities, or parameters of your products or services.
- Include prominent links for navigation, questions, and order placement on each page of your site.
- Provide product reviews and/or references.
- Answer inquiries promptly, and/or respond immediately with automated e-mails stating when you will follow up.
In building your website, avoid the following pitfalls:
- Too much flash, sound, and fury. You're trying to bring in customers, not win a design award. It's better to minimize on-site confusion and focus on explaining how you'll meet your customers' needs.
- Too much detail. Voluminous pages and files load slowly, which tends to make customers move on. For the same reason, minimize graphic files and high-resolution images wherever possible.
- Complicated navigational systems. Navigation should be simple and obvious, with consistent and prominent navigation bars on each page.
- Obscuring essential information. Present information in order of its importance to the customer. The text should be clear and concise.
Your business website can be an effective sales tool. Be sure you are giving it the attention it deserves.


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Hidden object game review
Find your missing fiancé in the deepest parts of the ocean in Abyss: The Wraiths of Eden!
Discover and investigate a forgotten underwater city that hides many spine-chilling secrets and supernatural forces which still lurk in every corner of this mysterious world. Face an ancient evil that is hiding in the deepest chambers of the once idyllic city of Eden.
Hold your breath and dive into this breathtaking underwater hidden object adventure — Abyss: The Wraiths of Eden!


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On January 28, 2012, Judge Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia issued a decision in a different Exelixis v. Kappos Patent Term Adjustment (PTA) case (1:12cv574) (Exelixis II) that affirms the USPTO's interpretation of 35 USC § 154(b)(1)(B)(i). Judge Brinkema's decision in Exelixis II is in direct conflict with the decision issued by her colleague, Judge Ellis, III, in Exelixis v. Kappos (1:12cv96) (Exelixis I) on November 1. 2012. As I wrote previously, the USPTO already has appealed Exelixis I. I expect Exelixis to appeal Exelixis II.
The Statute at Issue
As in Exelixis I, the statute at issue is 35 USC § 154(b)(1)(B)(i), which provides:
(B) GUARANTEE OF NO MORE THAN 3-YEAR APPLICATION PENDENCY.- Subject to the limitations under paragraph (2), if the issue of an original patent is delayed due to the failure of the United States Patent and Trademark Office to issue a patent within 3 years after the actual filing date of the application in the United States, not including–
(i) any time consumed by continued examination of the application requested by the applicant under section 132(b)…
The USPTO's interpretation of this provision is set forth in 37 CFR § 1.703(b)(1):
(b) The period of adjustment under § 1.702(b) is the number of days, if any, in the period beginning on the day after the date that is three years after the date on which the application was filed under 35 USC 111(a) or the national stage commenced under 35 USC 371(b) or (f) in an international application and ending on the date a patent was issued, but not including the sum of the following periods:
(1) The number of days, if any, in the period beginning on the date on which a request for continued examination of the application under 35 USC 132(b) was filed and ending on the date the patent was issued…
Thus, under the USPTO's interpretation, once an RCE is filed, the patent no longer accrues "B" delay, although it might still accrue "A" delay and/or "C" delay. (Please see my article on Exelixis I for a more detailed discussion of the PTA framework.)
Skidmore Deference
In reaching the decision in Exelixis I, the court did not give the USPTO "Skidmore deference," because the court found that the statute was "unambiguous." The court in Exelixis II, saw it differently, and disagreed that "the statute's silence as to RCEs filed after the three-year period expresses 'plain and unambiguous congressional intent.'" Instead, the court found:
[T]he PTO's regulation deserves Skidmore deference because it is a "reasonable conclusion as to the proper construction of the statute."
The court found that "Congress gave the PTO broad discretion to regulate how PTA is determined and RCEs are processed," citing 35 USC § 154(b)(3)(A). The court noted that the PTO "used its discretion to promulgate 37 CFR § 1.703(b)," and found that the rule is "consistent with abundant evidence of congressional intent concerning the effect of an applicant filing an RCE on the award of B-delay PTA." In particular, the court found that the PTO's interpretation was consistent with congressional intent that an applicant "should…not benefit when the delay was 'requested by' or otherwise attributable to the applicant."
Minimizing Manipulation
The court in Exelixis II also found that the PTO's interpretation of 35 USC § 154(b)(1)(B)(i) is consistent with concerns that applicants could "manipulate procedural devices to prolong the PTO's examination," and is more true to "[t]he decision to measure the term of a patent from the date of filing instead of the date of issuance." In this regard, the court noted:
Availability of unlimited RCEs creates the potential for the very abuses that spurred reform of the laws on patent terms in the first place.
The court reasoned that the PTO's interpretation "avoids the absurd result of treating an RCE filed before the termination of the three-year period differently than one that is filed after the three-year period.
The filing of an RCE…is…applicant-initiated delay whether filed before or after the three-year period has run.
The court pointed out that the PTO's interpretation "prevent[s] an applicant from using its control over the initiation of 'continued examination' to extend the term of a patent. (Indeed, as I wrote in this article, for most applications it would not be difficult to ensure that a first RCE is not filed until after the three-year period has run.)
The Post-Allowance Period
The court in Exelixis II also addressed the narrower question of whether B-delay should accrue after a Notice of Allowance is issued, because the time between allowance and grant is not "consumed by continued examination." (Please see this article for a more detailed discussion of this interpretation of the statute.) The court gave no credence to this argument:
The filing of an RCE opens a body of proceedings that may occasion additional processing delay, but as the PTO clearly indicated in its notice-and-comment rulemaking over a decade ago, such delay emanates solely from an applicant's original failure to file an application fit for a notice of allowance.
The court also draws a sharp line between cases allowed after an appeal to the Board, and cases allowed after an RCE:
[A]n applicant's successful appeal…implies no such applicant-related deficiency, but rather that the delay resulted from error by the PTO. Consistent with this distinction, the PTO duly awards B-delay PTA for the consequences of its own error…
The court therefore concludes:
When the applicant decides not to appeal a rejection…but instead takes advantage of the RCE process…all proceedings following the RCE filing…are "by virtue of the continued examination…" and are ineligible for B-delay PTA.
The Federal Circuit Fulcrum
As noted above, the USPTO already has appealed Exelixis I, and I expect Exelixis to appeal Exelixis II. Thus, the Federal Circuit likely will have the final say on the meaning of 35 USC § 154(b)(1)(B)(i). In the meantime, applicants who would be eligible for additional PTA under Exelixis I should file Requests for Reconsideration of PTA with the USPTO to preserve their rights in the event that Exelixis I is affirmed.
(Now that HR 6621 has become law, the deadline for bringing a district court civil action should be tolled while a Request for Reconsideration is pending at the USPTO.)


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Q. How do I get started on using my Montgomery or Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits? A. Applying is easy. Click here to begin your application process through VA. Q. Can I combine my Montgomery and Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits? A. No. Servicemembers and veterans are allowed to only use one education benefit program at a time. However, in some cases you may be able to use the Post-9/11 GI Bill when you have exhausted your Montgomery GI Bill. To learn more, please click here. Q. I am applying for a federal loan to help cover my tuition costs. Will the loan be paid directly to me after I have paid tuition, or will the money go straight to the school? A. How federal loans are paid varies from school to school. Please contact your school's financial aid office on federal loan payments and other student aid programs for which you may be eligible. Q. If I am enrolled in an online-school, which benefit should I choose – Montgomery or Post-9/11 GI Bill? A. For most students, the Post-9/11 GI Bill is more generous than the Montgomery GI Bill, but every student that qualifies for both should compare the benefits available through each before making a decision. For example, if you are studying strictly online you will see a 50% reduction in your Post-9/11 GI Bill living stipend Please note: if someone is eligible for both programs, the decision to use the Post-9/11 GI Bill is an irrevocable decision and the Montgomery GI Bill will no longer be available. Q. I am a service-connected disabled veteran; can my children use my Montgomery/Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits? A. Yes, as long as you have met the required time on active duty andtransferred your Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits to your children prior to your separation. Benefits under the Montgomery GI Bill are not transferable to children. For more information on transferability, please click here. Q. Once I've used either my Montgomery/Post-9/11 GI Bill benefit, can I use the other program to finish my education? A. Except under very limited circumstances where you can apply for a waiver, once you have used up your Montgomery or Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits, they are gone. However, if you are unemployed and between the ages of 35-60 you can receive up to one year of Montgomery GI Bill benefits for re-training under the VOW to Hire Heroes Act of 2011. For more information, please click here. The Montgomery GI Bill Q. How long after separation from service do I have to use my Montgomery GI Bill benefits? A. Typically, the Montgomery GI Bill benefits expire 10 years after separation from the military. There are some exceptions, however. To find out if you still have eligibility for the Montgomery GI Bill, please click here or call VA at 1-888-442-4551. Q. I retired from the military more than 20 years ago, but I never used my Montgomery GI Bill benefit, can I still use it today? A. Montgomery GI Bill benefits expire 10 years after the latest discharge, which must be under honorable conditions. However, if you are a veteran who is currently unemployed, and between the ages of 35-60, you may qualify for an additional year of Montgomery GI Bill benefits under the VOW to Hire Heroes Act. To learn more, please click here. Q. What are the eligibility criteria for a veteran with a general discharge who elected the Montgomery GI Bill at time of enlistment? A. To be eligible for the Montgomery Bill, you must have a discharge under honorable conditions. If you received a general discharge, that status would need to be changed in order to receive Montgomery GI Bill benefits. To request an upgrade to the character of discharge, contact your service's Board for the Correction of Military Records (BCMR). The Post-9/11 GI Bill Q. Is there an expiration of benefits for the Post-9/11 GI Bill? A. Yes. In most cases, servicemembers and veterans will need to use the Post-9/11 GI Bill within 15 years of discharge from the military. Q. I retired from the military before 2009, am I or are my dependents eligible for the Post-9/11 GI Bill? A. Anyone who served at least 90 days on active duty after September 11, 2001, is eligible for the Post-9/11 GI Bill. Those who served less than 36 months since 9/11/2001 will receive a reduced benefit. Those who retired prior to August 1, 2009, are not eligible to transfer benefits to their dependents. For information on eligibility and transferability, please click here. Q. Can I transfer my Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits to my spouse and children? What if I retired before putting them down as beneficiaries? A. Those who meet the time in service requirements and apply for transfer of benefits while still on active duty can transfer Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits to spouses and dependents. However, dependents must be named and assigned at least 1% of the benefits available prior to discharge. The percentages can be changed at any time. Please clickhere for more information on using the Post-9/11 GI Bill and transferability. Q. Can I use my Post-9/11 GI Bill for summer courses? A. Yes, participants in the Post-9/11 GI Bill can use the benefit to take summer courses so long as the course has been approved for GI Bill benefits. Please check with your guidance counselor for more information. Q. I retired from the military before the Post-9/11 GI Bill was available. Do I have access to the benefit, and if not, is anything available to me? A. Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits are dependent on the length of service post-September 11, 2001. Veterans with a service-connected disability may also qualify for the VA's Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment program. The VOW to Hire Heroes Act also contains training benefits for unemployed veterans between the ages of 35 and 60. To learn more about eligibility for the Post-9/11 GI Bill, and other VA educational programs, please click here. Q. What is the difference between Tuition Assistance and the Post-9/11 GI Bill? A. The Tuition Assistance (TA) program is administered by the Department of Defense and has its own set of rules and eligibility. The Post-9/11 GI Bill is a benefit program that is administered by the Department of Veterans Affairs. As such, servicemembers using TA can continue their education under the Post-9/11 GI Bill upon separation from the military. Q. Can I use my Post-9/11 GI Bill to a get a pilot's license and does the school need to be a FAA Part 141 School? Will books and other materials be paid for under my benefit? A. Yes, you can now use the Post-9/11 GI Bill for certain types of flight training. To learn more about the benefit, please click here. Q. Can I use my Post-9/11 GI Bill for other vocational training, such as a trade school or to get my CPA? A. Yes, the Post-9/11 GI Bill can be used for vocational training. For more information, please click here. Q. Am I entitled to a housing stipend from the Post-9/11 GI Bill if I am attending correspondence school or taking online classes? A. If you are taking all classes online you are eligible for up to 50% of the national average housing stipend. If you are taking correspondence courses, special rules apply. To learn more about correspondence schools under the Post-9/11 GI Bill, please click here. Q. Does ROTC count toward the Post-9/11 GI Bill? A. No. ROTC as well as Service Academy graduates must complete their initial active duty commitment before counting active duty toward Post-9/11 GI Bill eligibility. National Guard & Reserve GI Bill Questions Q. I am a member of the National Guard/Reserve, what type of days count toward Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits? A. Any time you spend on Title 10 active duty, or under certain types of Title 32 orders, count toward eligible time for the Post-9/11 GI Bill. Contact the VA for assistance in determining what types of active duty qualify for Post-9/11 GI Bill eligibility. Q. Are there types of Title 32, section 502(f) active duty that don't qualify for the Post-9/11 GI Bill? A. Currently, veterans can use Title 32 active duty time if it was for the purpose of organizing, administering, recruiting, instructing, or training the National Guard, or for the purposes of responding to a national emergency as declared by the President. The Post-9/11 GI Bill Yellow Ribbon Program Q. What criteria do I need to meet to qualify for the Yellow Ribbon program? A. You must have served at least 36 months on active duty to be eligible for Yellow Ribbon benefits. To review a list of schools participating in the Yellow Ribbon Program, please click here. Q. Do scholarships count against the payments made by VA when I use my Post-9/11 GI Bill? A. For those who qualify at the 100% rate, VA pays the net balance of tuition and fees after other sources of financial aid are applied to tuition and fees. For those qualifying for reduced Post-9/11 assistance, VA will pay the appropriate percentage of the tuition and fees. Non-GI Bill aid specifically designated for other that tuition and fees – for example for living expenses – will not reduce the VA's net payment.
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I am planning on going on a 10 month trip after my study as a Dutch citizen. In this 10 months I mostly want to travel, but as money will be needed at some point, I also want to work. By that time I will be 24 years old and have a master's degree, but as big companies probably won't hire me for 2-3 months I am aiming at more simple jobs like being a waiter, a postman, or something along those lines.
From this question I understand that my plan will not be executable in the USA as I'm not allowed to work on a nonimmigrant visa.
What non third world countries do allow temporary employment of foreigners in a way that will make my plan feasible?


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May 16, 1718 - January 9, 1799
Even though her contribution to mathematics are very important, Maria Gaetana Agnesi was not a typical famous mathematician. She led a quite simple life and she gave up mathematics very early. At first glance her life may seem to be boring, however, considering the circumstances in which she was raised, her accomplishments to mathematics are glorious. Enjoy!
In Italy, where the Renaissance had its origin, women made their mark on the academic world. Intellectual women were admired by men, they were never ridiculed for being intellectual and educated. This attitude enabled Italian women to participate in arts, medicine, literature, and mathematics. Among many others, Maria Gaetana Agnesi was by far one of the most important and extraordinary figure in mathematics during the 18th century.
"Maria Gaetana Agnesi was born in Milan on May 16, 1718, to a wealthy and literate family" [Osen, 39]. She was the oldest of the 21 children that her father, a rich merchant, had with his three wives. "She was recognized as a child prodigy very early; spoke French by the age of five; and had mastered Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and several modern languages by the age of nine. At her teens, Maria mastered mathematics" [Osen, 40]. The Agnesi home was a gathering place of the most distinguished intellectuals of the day. Maria participated in most of the seminars, engaging with the guests in abstract philosophical and mathematical discussions. Maria was very shy in nature and did not like these meetings. She continued participating in the home gatherings to please her father until the death of her mother. Her mother's death provided her the excuse to retire from public life. She took over management of the household. It is possible that this heavy duty job was one of the reasons why she never married.
However, she did not give up mathematics yet. In 1738 she published a collection of complex essays on natural science and philosophy called Propositiones Philosophicae, based on the discussions of the intellectuals who gathered at her father's home. In many of these essays, she expressed her conviction that women should be educated.
By the age of twenty, she began working on her most important work, Analytical Institutions, dealing with differential and integral calculus. "It is said that she started writing Analytical Institutions as a textbook for her brothers, which then grew into a more serious effort" [Osen, 41]. When her work was published in 1748, it caused a sensation in the academic world. It was one of the first and most complete works on finite and infinitesimal analysis. Maria's great contribution to mathematics with this book was that it brought the works of various mathematicians together in a very systematic way with her own interpretations. The book became a model of clarity, it was widely translated and used as a textbook. [See cover page, translation by John Colson at Google Books or American Libraries Internet Archive, the original Italian version, or excepts from the MAA Convergence Mathematical Treasures]
Analytical Institutions gave a clear summary of the state of knowledge in mathematical analysis. The first section of Analytical Institutions deals with the analysis of finite quantities. It also deals with elementary problems of maxima, minima, tangents, and inflection points. The second section discusses the analysis of infinitely small quantities. The third section is about integral calculus and gives a general discussion of the state of the knowledge. The last section deals with the inverse method of tangents and differential equations.
Maria Gaetana Agnesi is best known from the curve called the "Witch of Agnesi" (see illustration from her text Analytical Institutions). Agnesi wrote the equation of this curve in the form \(y = \frac{ax}{\sqrt{ax-x^2}}\) because she considered the x-axis to be the vertical axis and the y-axis to be the horizontal axis [Kennedy]. Reference frames today use x horizontal and y vertical, so the modern form of the curve is given by the Cartesian equation \(yx^2 = a^2(a-y)\) or \(y = \frac{a^3}{x^2+a^2}\). It is a versed sine curve, originally studied by Fermat. "It was called a versiera, a word derived from the Latin vertere, meaning 'to turn', but it was also an abbreviation for the Italian word avversiera, meaning 'the wife of the devil'" [Osen, 45]. However, when Maria's text was translated into English the word versiera was confused with "witch", and the curve came to be known as the witch of Agnesi.
After the success of her book, Maria was elected to the Bologna Academy of Sciences. The university sent her a diploma and her name was added to the faculty. However, there is a debate over whether or not Maria accepted this appointment since by this time she had devoted herself to her work with charity. It seems that her father was the inspiration for her interest in mathematics. When he died in 1752, Maria gave up any further work in mathematics. "When, in 1762, the University of Turin asked her for her opinion of the young Lagrange's recent articles on the calculus of variations, her response was that she was no longer concerned with such interests" [Osen, 47].
Maria was a very religious woman. She devoted the rest of her life to the poor and homeless sick people, especially women. When the Pio Instituto Trivulzo, a home for the ill and infirm, was opened, Maria was given an appointment as the director of the institute. She took care of ill and dying women until her own death.
It seems to me that even though she was a genius, mathematics was only a temporary hobby of hers. It may be that she was only dealing with mathematics to please her father who apparently was expecting his prodigy child to be involved in mathematics. Of course, this is only a personal observation. However, her behavior implies that she was not dedicated to mathematics which I think explains why she gave up mathematics altogether as soon as her father died. She was a very shy and decent person. She was not ambitious to become a well-known mathematician. Her most famous work, Analytical Institutions, was intended to be a textbook for her brothers. Her intelligence and talent made it possible to integrate all the state of the art knowledge about calculus in a very clear way. Religious life and helping the needy seem to have interested her more than mathematics.
April 1995
Notes by Larry Riddle
Maria Gaetana Agnesi's younger sister, Maria Teresa Agnesi, was a composer, harpsichordist, singer and librettist. She was born on October 17, 1720. While still a teenager, she would perform in her home while her older sister lectured and debated in Latin. Her first theatrical work, Il ristoro d'Arcadia, was successfully presented in Milan in 1747. She wrote seven operas of which three were based on her own librettos. The Empress Maria Theresia was known to sing from a collection of arias that Maria Teresa Agnesi had composed for her. In 1752 she married Pier Antonio Pinottini but had no children. She died on January 19, 1795. Her portrait hangs today in the theatre museum of La Scala.
Here are three of the keyboard pieces composed by Maria Teresa Agnesi. To listen to these pieces you will need to configure your browser to play midi files.
Sonata per il Clavicembalo
(Allegro and Menuet)
Sonata in G Major
Allegro ou Presto in A Major
The Canadian composer Elma Miller has written a work called "The Witch of Agnesi" for B flat clarinet, bass clarinet, horn, 2 percussion, viola and double bass. The work was commissioned by the Alliance for Canadian New Music Projects and was first performed in late October 1989 in Toronto. Despite its premier performance so near Halloween, the inspiration for the piece was the curve of Maria Agnesi! In the program notes Miller writes that "The witch of Agnesi refers to a well known mathematical curve, roughly in the shape of a mantelpiece clock. Melodic lines of this shape appear throughout the piece in both large and small scale representations." You can listen to an archival recording at the website for the Canadian Music Centre Music Library (free registration required for access to the recordings).


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While looking toward the future with our comprehensive slate of current content, we'd also like to recognize our rich past by drawing upon our extensive (and mostly free) online archive of work dating back to 1997. In an effort to highlight the best of what's gone before, we'll be bringing you a weekly blast from BP's past, introducing or re-introducing you to some of the most informative and entertaining authors who have passed through our virtual halls. If you have fond recollections of a BP piece that you'd like to nominate for re-exposure to a wider audience, send us your suggestion.
Joe Sheehan responded to the news of the sum the Red Sox agreed to pay to talk to Daisuke Matsuzaka in the piece reprinted below, which was originally published as a "Prospectus Today" column on November 16th, 2006.
Fifty-one point one. If this had been "The Price is Right," we'd all be standing there dumbfounded as Bob Barker tells us that no one is anywhere close to the right answer and we have to start again.
Fifty-one point one million dollars. In the run-up to the posting of Daisuke Matsuzaka, a lot of numbers were bandied about. I remember being in Phoenix at the Arizona Fall League, astounded that smart people were pushing the idea that the winning bid might be as high as $30 million. Even the seemingly insane rumors that were floated after the bid deadline-$42 million, $45 million-didn't go this high. The Red Sox just paid more for negotiating rights with one pitcher than they did for Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz over the past two years combined.
Of course, we're still near the start of the story. The Sox still have to sign Matsuzaka, and then we have to see if the righthander is worth all of this money. The former is no lock; if someone thinks the exclusive rights to negotiate with you for 30 days are worth $51 million, it's fair to say that you're going to want a contract worth at least that much. There has been idle speculation, some even within BP, that the Sox blew out the bidding on Matsuzaka as a preemptive measure, to ensure that the Yankees wouldn't get him. The idea is that the Sox, having spent $51 million already, will not make Matsuzaka an offer comparable to the other top free agents. If he signs, great; if he doesn't, well, they've kept him from wearing pinstripes.
It's just Machiavellian enough to sound appealing, but I don't believe it for a second. For one, the Sox can afford a massive cash outlay. They sold out the season with the highest average ticket prices in baseball, they own a piece of their highly-rated broadcast outlet and they've made the playoffs in three of the last four seasons. John Henry has had some success in other areas, too-writing the checks won't be a problem.
Beyond that, Matsuzaka is exactly what the Sox need, a top-of-the-rotation starter. If the $51 million is treated as a sunk cost, which it should be, the Sox should evaluate Matsuzaka as roughly equivalent to Roy Oswalt, who signed with the Astros for five years and $73 million. (Note: Many, many people have pointed out that this is wrong, because the money has not yet been paid, and will not be paid in the event the Sox do not sign Matsuzaka. I was trying to make the point that the posting fee is disconnected, from Matsuzaka's standpoint, from his negotiations. "Sunk cost" was the wrong term to use. My apologies, and my thanks for the feedback.–JSS) That may be the low end of the range for the top free-agent starters this winter, actually. It's not entirely clear how Matsuzaka and Scott Boras will approach the negotiation; will they look to maximize the overall value of this contract, or try and get Matsuzaka a lot of money in a shorter deal so that he can hit the market again-using the same contract clause Hideki Matsui did-while he's still in his prime?
In either case, the Sox have the cash flow and the payroll room to sign Matsuzaka for a market rate. There's no reason for them not to do so when adding him could push them ahead of the Yankees in the AL East.
Well, maybe "could" is a bit weak. After all, according to Clay Davenport, Matsuzaka's comparables are pretty much the best pitchers in baseball: Roger Clemens at the top, followed by Roy Halladay, Brandon Webb, Chris Carpenter and a whole lot of other names you might recognize from All-Star Games and Cy Young vote totals. His translated PERA over the last four years is just 3.41, far below that of Barry Zito and a bit below Jason Schmidt, the top two pitchers on the market right now. Given that the scouting evaluations of Matsuzaka are overwhelmingly positive, and that Matsuzaka was a star during the World Baseball Classic, all evidence points to him being at worst a low-end #1 starter in MLB.
If he meets those projections, will be be worth the Sox' massive investment in him? There's a lot of variables to pin down here, so what follows can best be considered an informed estimate.
Start with Clay Davenport's comparables, as referenced by Christina Kahrl in last week's piece on Matsuzaka, and let's use a four-year window based on the 2006 PECOTA cards. By using the old PECOTAs, the projections will err on the conservative side, because almost all of these pitchers have gotten through 2006 healthy and effective. The old PECOTAs discount the 2007-10 values more than the new ones will, but that's all right for our purposes.
The ten most comparable pitchers to Matsuzaka have the following projected WARP and MORP for 2007:
WARP MORP (in millions) Clemens 4.9 $8.25 Halladay 5.5 $10.13 Webb 6.4 $12.98 Sabathia 4.0 $6.08 Carpenter 5.4 $9.80 Schmidt 4.8 $8.10 Beckett 4.6 $7.45 Martinez 6.9 $14.65 Hudson 4.2 $6.45 Peavy 6.8 $14.38
Admittedly, this is a crude tool, although the end value looks right because the errors balance out. Pedro Martinez is, er, unlikely to be a seven-win player in 2007. On other other hand, the projections for Halladay, C.C. Sabathia and Jason Schmidt are all fairly low. If Matsuzaka's projection is the average of those ten hurlers, he'd project to be worth about 5.4 wins next year. Of course, the straight average probably doesn't credit Matsuzaka enough for being 26 years old, possessing a good health record and at or near his peak. He's more like Halladay, Webb or Jake Peavy than he is Clemens, Martinez or Tim Hudson, so again, the numbers above can be considered a conservative estimate.
One interesting aspect of this to me is the comparison with the Rule 4 draft. The baseball industry has just valued the exclusive negotiating rights with a top player from a lower level of baseball at $51.1 million. They'll pay nothing for the exclusive negotiating rights to the top players from a lower level of baseball next June, on draft day. I'm not calling for a revolution here, but if you're David Price or Andrew Brackman-or Scott Boras, for that matter-don't you have to wonder a little bit? Just as in 1996, when the exploitation of draft loopholes exposed just how much the draft held down signing bonuses, the Daisuke Matsuzaka posting fee shows just how valuable the exclusive right to negotiate with top players is worth. Because of a superstructure they had no hand in negotiating, though, the top players in the draft get nothing for what is clearly a valuable asset. If someone decides to challenge the draft in the next few years, the bid process for Matsuzaka is going to be one of the most significant pieces of their case. |
MORP, or Marginal Value Above Replacement Player, is a key figure here. Introduced by Nate Silver last year and expounded upon in Baseball Between the Numbers, the statistic attempts to measure the revenue a player's performance will be worth to his team. Based on the figures above, Matsuzaka's projected MORP would be about $10 million in '07.
Of course, this isn't a linear calculation. As Silver wrote in Baseball Between the Numbers, the wins a team gains between 86 and 93 each have a large impact on its chance of making the playoffs, and playoff appearances are the real moneymaker for teams, worth up to $25 million. The Red Sox are in that sweet spot, where every marginal win is worth a heck of a lot of potential revenue in terms of their chance of making the playoffs. If Matsuzaka's five wins above replacement push the Sox from being an 87-win team to a 92-win one, he's added a staggering amount of marginal value to the roster. This is a restatement of the earlier premise: the Red Sox have a lot to gain by signing Matsuzaka, and can justify paying more as a result.
Silver also passes this along:
Just looking at the very early returns from the free agent market, the amount that teams are willing to pay for a win has increased 29% from last year. What's scary is that several of these contracts involved likely "hometown discounts", so the market might end up even higher than that.
Per my method in Baseball Between the Numbers, the new structure of the revenue-sharing system increases the marginal value of a win by 21%. Add that to the 6-7% inflation we see in the system inherently and we get right to that 29% number.
Matsuzaka's 5.4 WARP would now be worth nearly $13 million based on inflation before taking into account his impact on the Sox' chance to reach the postseason.
One reason a team like the Red Sox, which has never had a Japanese star, is motivated to sign one is the potential for marketing opportunities. It's not easy to quantify what these mean to the bottom line, since much of the potential revenue has been tapped by MLB via broadcast contracts and licensing agreements. BP's Maury Brown says, "It may be hard to quantify the situation as a 1:1. Ichiro's value to the Mariners/Seattle is due to the location: Seattle sits on the Pacific Rim, and allows for a great deal of tourism dollars to be associated with Ichiro. I don't know if you will have the tourism dollars associated to Matsuzaka like you have with Ichiro, but other revenues may come along with his acquisition."
The Red Sox are not very well equipped to handle extra demand for tickets among Japanese fans, as they've about maxed out capacity at Fenway Park. They can capture some of the increased demand through raising ticket prices, although they already have the highest ones in the game and they run the risk of a loss of goodwill if they continue to squeeze the fan base. Because Sox games will be televised in Japan more often, they may have the opportunity to sell some stadium signage geared to that market. Neil deMause doesn't see that as a big factor, saying, "If signing Matsui allowed the Yankees to sell ad signage in the stadium to Japanese companies (I seem to recall the K counter is sponsored by one), how much more did they get over what they could have sold the boards for to another company?"
The Red Sox may have less to gain by adding a Japanese star than the Mariners or Yankees did in signing theirs, but they'll likely generate some additional revenue by having Matsuzaka as opposed to Barry Zito or Jason Schmidt. It is unlikely that those monies alone will cover the $51 million posting fee over a period of years. For the Sox to "win" on a Matsuzaka deal, they will have to do it on the field. Matsuzaka will have to pitch well enough to help the Red Sox go from a team that might make the playoffs to one that does, at least on a few occasions. It's those lucrative playoff appearances, and not the lure of a new market, that make paying twice for the services of one pitcher justifiable, even desirable.
Thank you for reading
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text:
Then Ráma bathed in order due,
His mind from worldly thoughts withdrew,
And with big large-eyed wife besought
Náráyan, as a votary ought.
Upon his head the brimming cup
Of holy oil he lifted up,
Then placed within the kindled fire
The offering to that heavenly Sire,
And as he sipped the remnant prayed
To Him for blessing and for aid.
Then with still lips and tranquil mind
With his Videhan he reclined,
In Vishnu's chapel, on a bed
Where holy grass was duly spread,
While still the prince's every thought
Tbe God supreme, Náráyan, sought.
One watch remained the night to close
When Ráma from his couch arose,
And bade the men and maids adorn
His palace for the solemn morn.
He heard the bards and heralds raise
Auspicious strains of joy and praise;
And breathed devout, with voice restrained,
The hymn for morning rites ordained;
Then, with his head in reverence bowed,
Praised Madhu's conquering foe aloud.
And, in pure linen robes arrayed,
The priests to raise their voices prayed.
Obedient to the summons they
Proclaimed to all the festal day.
The Bráhmans' voices, deep and sweet,
Resounded through the crowded street,
And echoed through Ayodhyá went
By many a loud-toned instrument.
Then all the people joyed to hear
That Ráma with his consort dear
Had fasted till the morning light
In preparation for the rite.
Swiftly the joyful tidings through
Ayodhyá's crowded city flew,
And soon as dawn appeared, each man
To decorate the town began.
In all the temples bright and fair
As white clouds towering in the air,
In streets, and where the cross-ways met,
Where holy fig-trees had been set,
In open square, in sacred shade,
Where merchants' shops their wealth displayed,
On all the mansions of the great,
And householders of wealth and state,
Where'er the people loved to meet,
Where'er a tree adorned the street,
Gay banners floated to the wind,
And ribands round the staves were twined.
Then clear the singers' voices rang,
As, charming mind and ear, they sang.
Here players shone in bright attire,
There dancing women swelled the quire.
Each with his friend had much to say
Of Ráma's consecration-day:
Yea, even children, as they played
At cottage doors beneath the shade.
The royal street with flowers was strown
Which loving hands in heaps had thrown,
And here and there rich incense lent
Its fragrance to the garland's scent;
And all was fresh and fair and bright
In honour of the coming rite.
With careful foresight to illume
With borrowed blaze the midnight gloom,
The crowds erected here and there
Trees in each street gay lamps to bear.
The city thus from side to side
In festal guise was beautified.
The people of the town who longed
To view the rite together thronged,
And filling every court and square
Praised the good king in converse there:
'Our high-souled king! He throws a grace
On old Ikshváku's royal race.
He feels his years' increasing weight,
And makes his son associate.
Great joy to us the choice will bring
Of Ráma for our lord and king.
The good and bad to him are known,
And long will he protect his own.
No pride his prudent breast may swell,
Most just, he loves his brothers well,
And to us all that love extends,
Cherished as brothers and as friends.
Long may our lord in life remain,
Good Das'aratha, free from stain,
By whose most gracious favour we
Ráma anointed king shall see.'
Such were the words the townsmen spoke
Heard by the gathering countryfolk,
Who from the south, north, east, and west,
Stirred by the joyful tidings, pressed.
For by their eager longing led
To Ráma's consecration sped
The villagers from every side,
And filled Ayodhyá's city wide.
This way and that way strayed the crowd,
While rose a murmur long and loud,
As when the full moon floods the skies
And Ocean's waves with thunder rise.
That town, like Indra's city fair,
While peasants thronged her ways.
Tumultuous roared like Ocean, where
Each flood-born monster plays.


text:
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b. Solar Has Won. Even If Coal Were Free to Burn, Power Stations Couldn't Compete
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Aliens designed DNA claim mathematicians, according to reports in Discovery 1 April 2013 news.com 10 April 2013 and Icarus vol. 224, pp228-242. Discovery reports: "Vladimir I. Cherbak of al-Farabi Kazakh National University of Kazakhstan, and Maxim A. Makukov of the Fesenkov Astrophysical Institute, hypothesize that an intelligent signal embedded in our genetic code would be a mathematical and semantic message that cannot be accounted for by Darwinian evolution. They call it 'biological SETI'". The mathematicians suggest that aliens would have done this, rather than send radio messages because DNA information is so stable, the message would be preserved over long periods of time, whereas radio signals are short lived.
Cherbak and Makukov carried out a mathematical analysis of the human genome and they claim to have found the use of decimal notation, logical transformations, and the use of the abstract symbol of zero in DNA code. They concluded: "Simple arrangements of the code reveal an ensemble of arithmetical and ideographical patterns of symbolic language". This led them to suggest that genetic code "appears that it was invented outside the solar system already several billions years ago". This idea is not new – it is a variation on the theory of "panspermia", which claims life did not arise on earth from chemicals, but was seeded from life elsewhere in the universe.
Editorial Comment: No, this is not an April fool's joke. Icarus is the serious, peer reviewed, scientific journal of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Science. Discovery and news.com have reported Cherbak's and Makukov's article accurately.
These mathematicians have recognised there is information in DNA that does not come from the properties of the matter which DNA is made of, plus they know that such sophisticated information comes from mind over matter, and not from chance random naturalistic processes. The information in DNA is in the way it is organised, not in what it is made of. It is this organisation that biologists recognised when they originally worked out the DNA code. Because they do not believe in the Creator God, Cherbak and Makukov have invented some lesser 'other intelligence' … creative Aliens! However, this modern variation of panspermia has the same problem as the original panspermia – how did the Aliens get here? How did they evolve naturally on any planet without an intelligent creator. It shifts the question rather than answering it.
And is there a message in DNA? Sure is! The Creator is much more clever than we are. Try to make DNA if you want to prove this. Also the Creator likes the number 3 since each chemical word in DNA has 3 parts to the word. (Ref. information, genetics, maths, code)
Evidence News 24 April 2013


text:
TechRadar Verdict
Big, characterful amp, with equally big and unforced sound that will appeal to many listeners
- +
Big, unflustered sound with excellent bass and timing
- +
Beautifully built
- +
Much-improved sense of timing and rhythm
- +
Useful range of outputs
- -
Huge size may prove difficult to accommodate
- -
Wide soundstage not always a plus
- -
May be too laid back for your tastes
- -
Case design means unsightly fingerprints
Why you can trust TechRadar
The ECI5 MkII replaces the ECI5, which in turn replaced the ECI4.7. Rather confusingly, the changes involved in going from the 4.7 to the 5 were generally considered detail ones, but warranted a new model number.
In contrast, the MkII has virtually no components in common with the MkI, but retains the model number! This might prove a challenge to dealers and customers, but we are sure everyone will manage.
Classic look
The ECI5 MkII is a 120 Watts per channel integrated amp finished in the company's traditional casework, complete with a thick Perspex front panel and a quartet of control buttons – left and right selecting inputs, and up and down controlling volume.
Aesthetically, this rather divides opinion. Some people love the rather retro-futuristic appearance and others regard it as a fingerprint magnet and dust trap.
The MkII introduces a neat LED display to show the selected input in place of the older backlit 'block' design. This is easy to read and a marked improvement on its predecessor.
We had hoped that this might have included the facility for the ECI5 MkII to default to the last selected input – something that the ECI5 and ECI3 cannot do – but the MkII selects the first balanced input on start-up, whether you use it or not.
The casework is comparatively large, with the ECI5 MkII nearly half-a-metre wide and over 400mm deep. This means that most equipment racks will struggle to accommodate it and you will most likely need to place it on a top shelf.
The fit and finish is extremely good with negligible panel gaps, excellent paint finish and the casework seems less resonant than on some older models. This also contributes towards the impressive 20kg weight.
Mention must also be made of the excellent quality speaker terminals and input connections that feel superbly over-engineered in use.
Under the hood
Internally, the only major component retained from the older model is the transformer. This is understandable, given Electrocompaniet's use of its distinctive floating transformer technology (FTT). Otherwise, the MkII takes the basic premise of the original ECI5 and makes substantial improvements. The MkII doubles the number of output devices used to improve bass control and stability when driving difficult loads.
This is further improved by the larger bank of reservoir capacitors, which allow for greater current delivery.
In practice, the ECI5 MkII is unlikely to struggle with any speaker design at a comparable price point, including electrostatic and planar designs. Like virtually every other Electrocompaniet component, the ECI5 MkII is a fully balanced design and sports a pair of balanced inputs to take advantage of this.
Electrocompaniet makes no apologies for preferring the balanced connections and, to this end, supplies a set of RCA-XLR adaptors to allow any would-be owner to experience at least some of the benefits, even if his or her source equipment isn't equipped with XLR outputs.
The ECI5 MkII is also fitted with a balanced preamp output, allowing it to connect to a matching power amplifier, either in a bi-amping configuration or exclusively as a preamp. The other four line inputs are the conventional RCA type.
The ECI5 MkII has to be considered relatively good value. The build quality is up to the standard we would expect and it supports a healthy number of inputs with full remote control. Most importantly, the amplification stage itself appears to be well thought-out and comprised of high-quality components.
The 120W output seems believable under the circumstances and means that system building around the Electrocompaniet should not be very difficult.
The lack of internal phono stage places the ECI5 MkII at a slight disadvantage for vinyl fans, however, against some of the similarly priced competition. But equally, the pair of balanced inputs is a useful feature for anybody with more than one suitably equipped source
Wide boy
Sonically, the ECI5 MkII is classic Electrocompaniet. The defining characteristic is an extremely wide soundstage, which seems to extend well beyond the physical placement of loudspeakers. This enormous sense of space gives the ECI5 MkII a relatively easy job when placing musicians and instruments coherently in relation to one another within it.
The large soundstage does have a habit of persisting, even when listening to small recordings, so there can be slight loss of intimacy to their reproduction, since they're given more space than perhaps they had in reality.
Many will accept this trade off for the sense of realism that the ECI5 MkII can bring to proceedings with larger-scale recordings.
This performance is complimented by excellent bass response. The bassline of any recording is presented with a force and weight that helps the overall sense of realism greatly.
This low-end force is deceptive, because despite the considerable heft that the Electrocompaniet has, there's no sense that it overwhelms the more delicate upper frequencies, or is out of proportion to the rest of the performance.
There's also a useful speed to the bass response – it starts and stops with commendable speed and helps give the ECI5 MkII a sense of timing and poise that we have not experienced with older designs.
In terms of tonality, the ECI5 MkII is a strong performer, if not a perfect one. The amp can sound fabulously real with vocals both solo and group, but instruments can occasionally sound fractionally flat and recessed by comparison.
This is not hugely pronounced and may simply be a reflection of how adept the ECI5 MkII is with vocals, but it can contribute to a wider sense that – like some other Electrocompaniet designs – there is a slight sense of smoothing off absolute detail and losing some excitement and vitality as it does so.
Depending on what you're looking for, this need not be a bad thing. It helps the Electrocompaniet stay entirely listenable even when playing back poor or harsh recordings, and the overall performance is so civilised that you can listen to the ECI5 MkII for hours without it ever becoming grating or tiresome.
Equally, there will be those who would prefer a little more excitement in their replay and are happy to accept that their listening may not be so even-handed. Here, the Electrocompaniet may prove too smooth and relaxed.
Fit and finish
The ECI5 MkII has much to commend it. It takes many of the traditional Electrocompaniet virtues and builds on them, adding a much-improved sense of timing and rhythm that gives a greater sense of life and enthusiasm to complex material. This is coupled to a useful power output that should handle most loudspeakers that it is likely to be partnered with in most domestic listening environments, and a useful selection of inputs and outputs.
The calm, unforced presentation may prove too laid back for some and this lack of perceived excitement may put off those who want a more forceful performance. Others will enjoy the way that the ECI5 MkII goes about making music and find it is exactly what they're looking for.
Follow TechRadar Reviews on Twitter: http://twitter.com/techradarreview


text:
Why it's impossible to argue with Progressives *UPDATED*
I said yesterday that we have to confront Leftists, because they will never go away. Today, though, I got a perfect example of why it's so gosh darn difficult to deal with them. To understand this point, I need to take you back to the post I wrote about a killer who is about to be released from prison in Texas.
Here's the brief run down: In 1996, Bernie Tiede shot and killed 81 year-old wealthy widow Marjorie Nugent. He hid her body in a freezer and spent the next few months running through her money before he was caught. He confessed to the murder and was sentenced to life in prison.
At this point, we need to be clear about a couple of things: First, Tiede is not facing the death penalty. Second, no one is arguing that any type of prejudice played a role in Tiede's conviction. He was convicted the old-fashioned way: he confessed to a premeditated murder and got the time for doing the crime.
Since Tiede's conviction, a few things have changed: Texas Monthly, a reliably Progressive publication, wrote about Tiede, saying he'd remembered that he'd been sexually molested as a child and that he revealed that he was a closeted gay man in East Texas. The magazine article led to a 2011 movie starring Jack Black, Shirley MacLaine, and other big name stars. And lastly, the prosecution and defense have agreed that Tiede's recently-remembered childhood sexual abuse and the stress of being a closeted gay man in Texas were such that he couldn't be held responsible for his well-organized murder and equally well-organized spending spree. Tiede is therefore set to walk free.
I think this is a travesty. It would be one thing if Tiede had been an innocent man railroaded because he was gay. It's another thing entirely saying that childhood molestation and being gay are mitigating factors to a life sentence for cold-blooded murder. Mike Devx neatly parsed what happened:
"Stress made him do it", is what this comes down to.
Well, the stress of being a soldier in war often leads to PTSD, and that stress must be worse than this stress. So the way I see it, every soldier who has been or will be diagnosed with PTSD is now free to kill anyone they want to, and take the dead person's money and live on it. It's only fair.
To get to my point about the difficulty of arguing with a Leftist, let me repeat the core matters at issue in the Tiede case: Tiede is a self-confessed murderer who got a life sentence, but is about to be set free because he has successfully proven himself to be a member of the official victim class of the 21st century, relieving him of any responsibility for his evil acts.
So what does one of my reliably Leftist friends say when I politely (very politely) pointed out on Facebook that a cold-blooded, self-confessed murderer will get released from a life sentence because he was stressed? My friend says this:
I don't know what to think. The movie made me feel sympathy for him, but I also think he wouldn't have been released from his life sentence if he was black. Since our system is inherently racist, we must abolish the death penalty.
Did you see anything in Tiede's story about either race or the death penalty? I didn't. But in response to my politely expressed surprise about a murderer walking because it's tough to be gay in Texas, she makes a bizarrely disjointed statement about sympathy for Tiede because of a Hollywood film, which she somehow contrasts to the fact that black people would be treated differently. And then, having inserted race into the matter, she speeds ahead to announce that the death penalty is inherently unfair to blacks so the institution should be demolished. I'm dizzy and confused.
Because I pick my battles, I don't feel inclined to waste my time pointing out to this "well-educated" Progressive that, not only is her statement confused, random, and illogical, but she's also wrong when it comes to data about blacks and the death penalty. Because all of you care about facts, though, I'll share the actual data with you:
2. [From ABC:] "Some states . . . for the same crime [are] three times more likely to sentence an African-American defendant to death. I think that's very, very troubling. . . . Race is an issue."
This is simply false. In murder cases, whites are executed much more frequently. Nationally, from 1977, when the death penalty was reinstituted, to 2011, the last year for which the FBI has compiled data, 64.7 percent of those executed were whites, but whites committed only 47 percent of the murders.
Nor do individual states stand out in the way this statement claimed. I went through the totals for each individual state over the seven years from 2005 to 2011, and none have the imbalance the ABC News panel complained about. Missouri was close, with five blacks and two whites executed. Only three other states, including heavily Democratic Maryland, executed more blacks than whites, and in each case only one more black was executed. (To see state-by-state data for a given year in this range, search for "capital punishment [insert year] statistical tables.")
An honest evaluation has to start with explaining why white murderers are executed at a greater rate than black murderers.
Just like adolescents, Progressives won't stick to the subject, ignore the facts, and are willing to repeat their unfounded statements 'til the cows come home. It makes for very difficult arguments, because you have to ignore the red herrings and resolutely and repeatedly bring your errant Leftist back to the main issue.
UPDATE 2: The twitter image below, in my original update is false, says Sturmtrooper. I got pwned. Bad me! I did buy into my own biases, since it so perfectly aligned with the actual Facebook comment that a genuine friend of mine actually made.
The twitter picture is fake. The real moms demand action handle is @momsdemand note the D at the end. The one in the picture is momsdeman without the D.
If you look on the actual momsdemand twitter page they even mention it.
UPDATE: Another example of Progressive "logic" in action:


text:
Who's that girl?
Ever since 1st grade started, our mornings are pretty action packed and crazy and dragging a hair brush through Gwen's super long locks causes way too much agony for both of us.
For months, I've threatened to cut her hair and she finally called my bluff so, last weekend, I chopped about ten inches off! It's still what most people would consider "long" but it's nothing like it used to be and the biggest surprise of all is.... I like it.
After school today, I asked her to come outside so I could snap a few photos of her new 'do' in the sunlight. These aren't the best quality but I just love the images I captured of this little Thief-O-Hearts.
I keep lip gloss in the camera bag because her lips are always chapped and it's so hard to fix that in photoshop. She usually HATES the lipgloss but today she wanted to put it on all by herself.
I handed it to her and she slowly unscrewed the top. Then she looked at her reflection in my sunglasses and smeared the pearly goo all over her mouth and chin. I was laughing so hard I could hardly see through the viewfinder!
We cleaned up the glossy overflow and then she decided that she needed to "paint" her fingernails.
This is a kid who has NEVER let me paint her fingernails with actual nail polish. She had so much fun covering each fingernail with lip-gloss and I had even more fun taking photos of it!
But weren't we here to take pics of her new hairdo?
Here's a pretty motion pic of her amazingly thick hair from the back. Don't you wish YOUR hair was this thick?
Here's the swingy hair shot when she turned around. Oh, if only they gave out hair scolarships to college.
Ah, what a sweetie!
You might notice that she's wearing a skimpy little shirt in these photos even though we're a week into November. I dressed her in three layers of shirts this morning but this is how my little goofball came home.


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text: I was installing a new head node for a cluster, Tyan S2882 motherboard, dual opteron, dual 3ware cards (installed on seperate pci-x busses), and 16 400 GB SATA disks. The headnode seemed mostly fine, fast, no error messages, but occasionally during burn in it would hang. At that point I couldn't turn the machine off with the power switch. When unplugged and replugged in the machine would immediate spin up all fans, link lights on both network interfaces, but not boot up, no video sync, nothing on the serial console. Troubleshooting involved removing raid cards which fixed the problem, but it turns out it wasn't the cards but the screws holding the PCI-x cards in. Further exploration showed that the motherboard has 12 mounting holes but the case had 13 standoffs. One directly under the 2 raid cards did not have a matching motherboard hole. After repeating this effect several dozen times I confirmed that this was the problem. A large pair of channel locks removed the offending motherboard post. After a careful wipedown of the inside of the case (to remove any conductive particles) the server seems to be working well. I'm not sure if I should blame Chenbro, Tyan, or the person who assembled the machine, but in any case I figure I'd let people know about it. I've heard occasional stories about flaky tyan motherboards and it's possible this is a contributing factor. So if you have any flakey tyan boards especially if in a chenbro enclosure make sure that your mounting posts and motherboard mounting holes line up. -- Bill Broadley Computational Science and Engineering UC Davis


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What does a literary critic's apotheosis look like? One path of ascension begins with a piece of cultural critique so ruddy it gets mistaken for a slab of steak in the pages of The New Republic. He also writes fiction, but he is never one of them, and novelists loathe him. He publishes collections of meaty essays that other critics chew on. His clarity of conviction prompts him to praise Flaubert, Henry James, and Joyce, though the praise is qualified. He must indubitably ascend to The New Yorker and begin teaching at an Ivy League school. At which point he settles into his late memoir years, graying like King Lear.
The critic I'm talking about, of course, is Edmund Wilson. His noggin was as brazen as Proust's and Joyce's, and he praised them even as he head-butted them in The New Republic, where he was an editor in the 1920s and '30s, and such pieces were collected in Axel's Castle. Then came the aggressive studies on Pushkin, Flaubert, Henry James, Dickens, Hemingway, and Marxism in The Triple Thinkers, The Wound and the Bow and To the Finland Station. Alfred Kazin and Cyril Connolly gave his book of short stories, Memoirs of Hecate County, mixed reviews, and Vladimir Nabokov told his then-friend and soon-to-be enemy that "there are lots of wonderful things in it," without specifying whether the many wonderful things were the page numbers. He became the chief book critic for The New Yorker in the '40s, and taught occasionally at Chicago and Princeton and sometimes lectured at Harvard. In the '60s, and during his 60s, he turned to journals about life in the upstate New York town of Talcottville: "Birds flit back and forth between the rapids. The cliffs where they overhang are dripping with springs."
The critic you thought I was talking about is James Wood. Their resumes are nearly identical. Like Wilson, who has been called the final great American all-around man of letters and the last of the public intellectuals, Wood has been consecrated the best and most important critic of his time, as every story about him must invariably mention. In the squally pit of criticism, Wood is the brightest beacon and the biggest target. But if Wilson's trajectory can be looked on as an example, there are signs that Wood might be taking his light elsewhere.
I recently spent two days with Wood, sitting in on his literature seminars. We read Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Chekhov's Rothschild's Fiddle and The Bishop at Harvard, and Bellow's Seize the Day at Columbia. Visiting with him before and after classes, we got around to talking about Wilson, who is the subject of a long essay at the heart of Wood's new collection, The Fun Stuff. "Wilson preferred to be called a journalist rather than a critic," Wood writes. "And there is an attractive wholesomeness to this preference … [But] Wilson's literary criticism, with its introductory relish, its recourse to biographical speculation, and its swerve away from aesthetic questions, now looks more journalistic than it once did," which really means that he wasn't very good at it—he imposed judgments without justification, and had a will to power, reading the author's entire output and forcing connections to the person's life. Wilson is journalistic only in his hunger for stories and in his embrace of clock-punching work, the kind that won't stop until a bookshelf is rampaged through.
But Wood also considers himself a journalist—rather, it is a matter of fact that he has always worked in journalism. Reading is not something just for fun—it is labor. Wood was born in northern England in 1965 the son of a professor of zoology at Durham University who is also a priest. "There was, while I was growing up, a rather Victorian feel to the household, where my father had fallen into that 19th-century mode of a clergyman naturalist," Wood told me. "Preaches on Sundays, and on Saturdays, goes out and collects algae."
Wood wasn't a particularly devoted reader until 11 or 12, whereas his 11-year-old daughter, Livia, was already devouring books at 6. "Reading makes me a bit restless," he said, which comes as a bit of a shock. "There's a certain childish side of me that asserts itself and wants to sort of go outside and climb an apple tree or something."
His procrastination, however, didn't stop him from graduating top of the class at Cambridge in 1988, whereupon he got himself a job at The Guardian. "My decision not to do a graduate degree but to get to London and earn a living by the pen was hugely influenced by my sense that this was still a living tradition. And in the mid- to late-1980s in London, it still was—Anthony Burgess and Lorna Sage and Clive James and Martin Amis and V.S. Pritchett were at work in the newspapers you might pick up on any day."
One look at Wood and you might suspect that he takes "work" to its logical, physical conclusion. Lean and fit, Wood has the body of a European football coach. He doesn't wear a tracksuit, but his clothes are functional: the casual dress shoes of a consummate walker, a simple fall jacket over a nondescript collared shirt characteristic of no one in particular at all, a worn satchel that snugly carries all his books. On top of his frame rests a balding head, sprouting mowed blades of thin hair and so round and dense that it shares a functional convenience with that of Wilson's—both are ready to mete out and accept impact at all angles. It is what a critic needs. Some readers and many novelists mark him as a stubborn pontiff whose only affections are for the realists—Flaubert, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Bellow, Norman Rush—although even at this reductive characterization the "realists" are more different than similar to one another.
This suspicion of Wood began in 2000 with The New Republic's "Human, All Too Inhuman," in which Wood hogtied not one, not two, but half a dozen postmodern novelists like Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon. It established Wood's reputation as a man who dismissed experimentation and preferred tradition. Not only that, but people saw in Wood a critic who did not want to deal with the political and social uncertainty of the times—he seemed to only handle the writing. (How shocking! A critic who examines sentences!) For this crime he's branded the worse kind of cattle: an aesthete.
Since then, Wood has written a novel, The Book Against God, and landed the jobs of chief book critic for The New Yorker and professor of literary criticism at Harvard. From those twin thrones he makes his rulings, an impression he made worse by calling his 2008 book How Fiction Works. The supposed arrogance irked those who only read the title, as if adults shouldn't need to be told how fiction works. In The Nation, William Deresiewicz took to critiquing what he saw as Wood's balancing act on his narrow strip of realism. "Too much is sacrificed on the altar of this aesthetic theology—too much in fiction that is fine; too much, finally, that is true," Deresiewicz mourns.
"It's funny to me that I'm often written up as a great proponent of realism," Wood told me. "It's true that there are elements of realism that I like and explore. But as often as not, I also attack a certain kind of realism that I'm not interested in, and have done ever since I wrote about Tom Wolfe, or indeed when I wrote about Franzen."
Wood represents an approach that maintains a confident front even in the face of doubt, precisely because he's dealing with such a shapeless thing as fiction. To consider fiction in a similar cloud of dust would be rather pointless, like wrapping fire with a veil. Instead, Wood uses the devices of fiction in his own nonfiction, and his sharpest weapons are his moments of perfect characterizations. In his first collection, The Broken Estate: "metaphor," for Virginia Woolf, "is the way to explode sequence"; "when it comes to language, all writers want to be billionaires," like Melville; Hemingway, Pavese and Beckett are "the deliberate paupers of style," choosing "bankruptcy after wealth"; on Hemingway again: "an icicle formed from the drip of style"; on D.H. Lawrence: "language at its densest becomes its own medium, like night." In The Irresponsible Self, he writes that Saul Bellow's prose makes even Melville's sound Bellovian, that it is "germinal"; Tom Wolfe's novels are "placards of simplicity"; "a genre is hardening," he wrote of hysterical realism, "a perpetual-motion machine" that's "embarrassed into velocity" and wishes to "harass realism into a state of self-examination"— you can picture it blushing as Wood is possessed to catch up with that clump of overworked realism and urge it to slow down. From How Fiction Works: "novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it all begins again with him"; Graham Greene and John le Carré can be called "commercial realism." And his new volume has perhaps the highest density of memorable lines: he calls V.S. Naipaul "an empire of one"; Tolstoy's characters in War and Peace are brought to life by "the high temperature of their existences"; a parody of Paul Auster "is unfair, but diligently so"; Norman Rush is "the only considerable American novelist who has never yet written about America"; Geoff Dyer's books are "as unique as door keys." (Aesthete! so the charge reads.)
Wood is not afraid of bearing his guts. "When man thinks, God laughs," so goes a proverb. But Wood's criticism precisely allows you to see him thinking. If he is a card-carrying member of the Free Indirect Speech Party, you know it because he says as much in How Fiction Works:
Free indirect style is at its most powerful when hardly visible or audible: "Ted watched the orchestra through stupid tears." In my example, the word "stupid" marks the sentence as written in free indirect style. Remove it, and we have standard reported thought: "Ted watched the orchestra through tears."
This is a classic Woodian step-by-step inductive survey, one that would make proud the theorist Northrop Frye, who was certain that the anatomy of criticism consists of equal parts art and science, that "the writing of history is an art, but no one doubts that scientific principles are involved in the historian's treatment of evidence, and that the presence of this scientific element is what distinguishes history from legend." Good journalism draws its power from evidence. Claims should be falsifiable. Arguments ought to be supported by observations. Wood always makes an argument, and always backs it up. He tries to be consistent, but his detractors see it as inflexibility. "Unforgiving" is the critic Daniel Mendelsohn's word for it. He quotes Wood—"fiction demands belief from us, and that is demanding partly because we can choose not to believe"—then observes what happens when you substitute the word "God" for "fiction." "Much of his criticism makes you wonder whether he hasn't exchanged one set of absolutes for another." Mendelsohn's is a big blow, but it's hard to see an alternative if you want to maintain consistency and rigor. The other choice is the fecklessness of unpredictable judgment, to read to experience the flourish only.
Wood's critical apotheosis has come with a good-size portion of literary estrangement. Heidi Julavits said that Wood's "curmudgeonliness is a crime of idealism." The editors of n+1 mocked him thus: "Poor James Wood! Now here was a talent—but an odd one, with a narrow, aesthetician's interests and idiosyncratic tastes." Jonathan Lethem went through the trouble of avenging an 8-year-old mixed review by attacking Wood as "a unpersuasive critic whose air of erudite amplitude veiled—barely—a punitive parochialism." Colson Whitehead, in a satire called "Wow, Fiction Works!" called him "an overeducated British jerk and a lamewad." Wood, the notorious critic, has succeeded in notoriety too well.
And the apotheosis is complete, an ascension into an empty cloud. Trusted by some and disdained by others, Wood is the lonely grouch at the top of his game, enjoying his view from The New Yorker and Harvard, out to kill fun.
The only problem is that this doesn't square with the real Wood. For every novelist in the enemy camp he has one among his friends: Rush, Dyer, Amit Chaudhuri, Martin Amis, Amy Hempel, Peter Carey, Jonathan Coe, Jane Mendelsohn, David Bezmozgis, Susanna Kaysen, Michael Ondaatje … and of course, one among his family members: his wife Claire Messud. As to the charge that he is too much of an aesthete who's afraid of the sun, here is a critic whose most striking feature is his demand that writers, when in their basement rooms or in the space in their heads, open out to the vast geography of life, and enter it rather than retreat into art.
The image definitely does not square with the new Wood, who makes it a point to not only analyze books but to enjoy life—"alive, and very much so," as he quoted Tolstoy's diary. During Wood's bouncy teenage years of the late '70s and early '80s London, the god of living could best be spotted in the airwaves, where rock and roll was spreading like a pandemic. In those days, Wood's hero was Keith Moon, The Who's drummer. In an uncharacteristically personal turn, he confesses his fandom in the opening and titular essay of The Fun Stuff. Up until now Wood has been making his living by extracting meaning from ostensibly meaningless sentences in novels. How does this jibe with Moon's drumming, which is obviously a loud, exuberantly physical and auditory show? How much of Moon needs to be "read"? Turns out, a lot, as few have taken the trouble to do it. There is a lot to say:
Sitting behind the drums was also like a fantasy of driving (the other great prepubescent ambition), with my feet established on two pedals, bass drum and hi-hat, and the willing dials staring back at me like a blank dashboard … Everyone secretly wants to play the drums, because hitting things, like yelling, returns us to the innocent violence of childhood.
Behind the fantasy dashboard sat Wood, conducting a violent campaign on snares and cymbals, and admiring the ultimate truant. "Keith Moon's drumming, in its inspired vandalism, was the crime itself," he writes, taking his beloved associative leap:
Moon fails to stop at the obvious end of the musical phrase and continues with his rolling break, over the line and into the start of the next phrase. In poetry, this failure to stop at the end of the line, this challenge to metrical closure, this desire to get more in, is called enjambment. Moon is the drummer of enjambment. For me, this playing is like an ideal sentence, a sentence I have always wanted to write and never quite had the confidence to do: a long, passionate onrush, formally controlled and joyously messy, propulsive but digressively self-interrupted, attired but dishevelled, careful and lawless, right and wrong.
What Wood wants to enjamb is not poetry or drumming, but his own childhood, and to reconcile a nostalgia for a messy, disheveled, lawless Jimmy with the formally controlled, attired and careful James of today. "When I listen to the second, how I want to be the first!"
Although he's had personal elements in his reviews before, The Fun Stuff marks the first time Wood's essays are not prefaced by an introduction, but are bookended by two personal essays—his Moon-love is his introduction. "I've been trying myself just to move away a little bit from just always reviewing," he said. "It's tiresome after a while just to hand down judgments all day, all night. You want to do something else with the language."
He's been at work on his second novel; since late summer he's written about 35 pages. It's about an English businessman in his 60s who has two daughters, one of whom lives in Britain and works in music industry. The other teaches in the U.S. at a small college, but suffers from depression and tries to commit suicide. This spurs the dad to visit his daughter, though he hasn't been to the States for some time. "He finds it very hard to give his daughter a specific rationale for going on living," Wood explained. "I want the dynamic very much to be her needing her father's reassurance: tell me why I need to go on."
Is he ready to go through this again? After all, his first novel was not that well received. It is a veiled autobiographical tale featuring Thomas Bunting, a 30-something from Durham who's living in London trying, after seven years, to finish his philosophy dissertation—a huge atheist treatise called The Book Against God. His father is not only a priest but resembles something like a stand-in for the Heavenly Father Himself, while Bunting's climatic reckoning happens at dad's funeral. (Wood's own father and mother are alive and well.) It's packed with knowingness and wit, but perhaps too much so, so that the fiction acquires an allegorical stuffiness—there is no room to breathe. Mendelsohn called it "an able and occasionally excellent first novel, filled with pleasures for the reader, flawed by pretentiousness, top-heavy with 'meaning,' wobbly in tone, hobbled, ultimately, by a failure to bring off the grand message it seeks to deliver."
"I didn't feel I got the hang of it," Wood confessed. "That's what first novels are for—not getting the hang of it." Both his first and his forthcoming second novel looks at death ("I denied my father three times, twice before he died, once afterwards," is how The Book Against God begins) and searches for a reason to live ("Wasn't it an orchard, my childhood? But why, then, the worm? Why the worm? Tell me," is how it ends.) When do you chase after life? When death is chasing you. Wood is only 47, but death has lately loitered in the family circle. His mother-in-law passed away in October, and Messud's been away in France, tending to her dying aunt, her father's sister, who never married and has just two nieces to turn to. It doesn't help that my psychobiography can be urged on by the fact that all four stories and novellas he assigned during my class visits all dealt explicitly with death—all of them begin or end with a funeral—though this was nothing more than a coincidence.
The death that weighs most heavily on Wood has been his father-in-law's. "Packing My Father-In-Law's Library" is the decidedly not-fun activity and somberly cautionary essay that closes The Fun Stuff. It is a corrective against Walter Benjamin's "Unpacking My Library," a realization that there's nothing enjoyable about leaving behind "shelves of eloquent, mute books, sunk in themselves like a rotting paper harvest."
The other model for "Packing My Father-In-Law's Library" was Edmund Wilson's late work; it is his library that is the "rotting paper harvest." Wilson died in Talcottville in 1972, but not before chronicling life in that stranded countryside. It is there that he saw "birds flit back and forth between the rapids. The cliffs where they overhang are dripping with springs." Wood loves late Wilson: "His reputation will persist because of many pieces of work that have not lasted." Wilson's earlier book reviews and political journalism did not age well in Wood's eyes. In turn, Wood calls "The Author at Sixty," Wilson's portrait of his father, one of the critic's finest, thanks to the "lovely stern objectivity" that he applies to Edmund Wilson Sr. "Packing My Father-In-Law's Library" isn't just about packing a library, but also about an unforgiving father-in-law who "floated on top of American life, privileged, wounded, unmoored," whose books "incarnated the shape of this life, but not the angles of his facets," and were simply results of greedy intellectual purchases.
No surprise, too, that Wood's piece isn't just about his father-in-law, but about himself, his own humility in his chosen occupation. "Our libraries perhaps say nothing very particular about us at all," he writes. "We strangely persist in pretending that books are not ruins, not broken columns." This tolling, soulful sentence reminds me of a pronouncement: "As he swerved away from journalism, from the weekly or monthly treadle of reviewing, and into memoir and the writing of his journals, so his prose took on a new lyricism." That's Wood writing about Wilson. But couldn't it equally be Wood writing about Wood?


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Luis Suarez scored a hat-trick to drive Liverpool to a 4-0 victory over Wigan and overtake Robin van Persie in the race for the Premier League Golden Boot.
Inspired by Suarez and Philippe Coutinho, who laid on two assists, the Reds raced into a three-goal lead by half-time after Stewart Downing opened the scoring and the 21-goal scorer struck twice.
And soon after the break the away supporters were saluting Suarez again when he raced clear of the Wigan defence to add a fourth goal.
Reading had earlier lost to Everton while Aston Villa face a difficult match against Manchester City on Monday night but the Latics' leaky defence cost them a chance to boost their hopes of top-flight survival.
After his side's 3-0 victory over Reading, Wigan boss Roberto Martinez unsurprisingly chose to name an unchanged team but his counterpart Brendan Rodgers was without Daniel Sturridge.
Suarez, therefore, reprised the centre-forward role and Joe Allen came into midfield to allow Steven Gerrard to push forward into a position between Downing and Coutinho.
Sturridge has added a new dimension to the Reds' attack but so might Coutinho, and the young Brazilian quickly eased any fears Rodgers might have had in the absence of his in-form striker.
Emmerson Boyce had provided a cross which Arouna Kone failed to control when totally unmarked in the box in the opening minute but the wing-back did not fare so well in his own half when Coutinho skipped past him on the left.
The 20-year-old took a quick glance across goal and teed up a cross to the back post which Downing nodded past Ali Al-Habsi from close range.
Suarez soon doubled the visitors' lead after fine work in midfield by Gerrard and Coutinho, with the latter this time producing a through ball that left the Uruguayan with only Al-Habsi to beat as Wigan's defending threatened to descend into the ridiculous.
Boyce forced a superb save from Pepe Reina with a volley immediately afterwards but the never-uninvolved 33-year-old then needlessly initiated a shoving match with James McArthur after the midfielder's poor back-pass almost set Suarez free.
In rather more unfortunate circumstances, Suarez made it three when his free kick from 25 yards deflected off the head of Maloney to leave Al-Habsi scrambling back across goal in a vain attempt to claw the ball away from the bottom corner.
Franco Di Santo had shown signs of life in attack for Wigan and nearly put a dent in Liverpool's lead with a powerful header from eight yards, but Reina was at the peak of his powers all evening and pushed the ball over the crossbar.
Martinez opted to stick with his 11 starters after half-time but Roger Espinoza and Antolin Alcaraz were promptly introduced after Glen Johnson raced forward to release Suarez, who poked a shot between Al-Habsi's legs.
Wigan mustered very little thereafter, though, and Reina needed only to make two saves from Maloney to preserve a well-earned clean sheet.


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Kenya: Introduction
Kenya is a country in Eastern Africa bordering the Indian Ocean and Lake Victoria. Neighboring countries include Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda. Unique Kenyan physiography, from highlands to glaciers, supports abundant and varied wildlife of scientific and economic value. The government system is a republic; the chief of state and head of government is the president. Kenya has a mixed economic system, which includes a variety of private freedoms combined with centralized economic planning and government regulation. Kenya is a member of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) and the East African Community (EAC).
From the Blog
How Companies are Buying Out of Carbon Debt
Pandemic Learning Losses - What Actions Countries Have Taken & How Businesses are Changing
Quick Links
Kenya: U.S. Commercial Service - Country Commercial Guide
Kenya: World Bank - Doing Business Indicators
Kenya: U.S. Department of State - Country Travel Information